mahfil barḳhāst hai patañge
ruḳhsat sham.oñ se ho rahe haiñ
hai kuuch kā vaqt āsmāñ par
taare kahīñ naam ko rahe haiñ
un kī bhī numūd hai koī dam
vo bhī na raheñge jo rahe haiñ
duniyā kā ye rang aur ham ko
kuchh hosh nahīñ hai so rahe haiñ
For the full ghazal, see here
This bit is from Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy:
Maan looked at her with half-longing, half-laughing eyes. ‘I’ll arrange for the car,’ he said.
‘I’ll walk in the garden till then,’ said Saeeda Bai. ‘This is the most beautiful time of night. Just have this’—she indicated the harmonium—‘and the other things—sent back to my place tomorrow morning. Well, then,’ she continued to the five or six people left in the courtyard:
‘Now Mir takes his leave from the temple of idols—
We shall meet again . . .’
Maan completed the couplet: ‘. . . if it be God’s will.’
He looked at her for an acknowledging nod, but she had turned towards the garden already.
Saeeda Bai Firozabadi, suddenly weary ‘of all this’ (but what was ‘all this’?) strolled for a minute or two through the garden of Prem Nivas. She touched the glossy leaves of a pomelo tree. The harsingar was no longer in bloom, but a jacaranda flower dropped downwards in the darkness. She looked up and smiled to herself a little sadly. Everything was quiet: not even a watchman, not even a dog. A few favourite lines from a minor poet, Minai, came to her mind, and she recited, rather than sang, them aloud:
‘The meeting has dispersed; the moths
Bid farewell to the candlelight.
Departure’s hour is on the sky.
Only a few stars mark the night. . . .’
She coughed a little—for the night had got chilly all of a sudden—wrapped her light shawl more closely around her, and waited for someone to escort her to her own house, also in Pasand Bagh, no more than a few minutes away.
In ‘The Rivered Earth, Seth adds these:
What has remained will not remain:
They too will quickly disappear.
This is the world’s way, although we,
Lost to the world, lie sleeping here.
Juvenilia 